They look like dandelions, but they are harbingers of how crowded with life May becomes. Every brilliant yellow head reminds me of another bit of living I should go engage.

In May, the wildflowers finish their warmups and get on with the business unique to the flowering plants — blooming! Pasqueflowers, buttercups and spring beauties progress from their March and April peek-a-boo here and peek-a-boo there to an exuberant bloom that proclaims they can scarcely wait for the snow to melt, much less wait for summer.

The south-facing slopes where the early wildflowers erupt also support the tiny striped chorus frogs. They gather in the snowmelt pools where the males call to attract the females. Their sound is the equivalent of the flowers’ colors; each begins the season of once-a-year mating, the season when life perpetuates life.

As the elk and their bugling are to autumn, so the striped chorus frogs and their chirping are to spring. One is not magnificent for being big, and the other is not insignificant for being little; they are each spectacular merely for what they are, for living their lives as they do, for connecting life to place and to season.

Going afield to hear elk bugle in September but ignoring the chorus frogs in May is like buying one bookend, one sock, one scissor blade.

Understanding this — it’s about the life and the living not about the being big or little — marks essential accomplishment in the quest of the person who would be a naturalist.

Walking these slopes, listening for the chorus frogs and looking for the wildflowers, exerts what I call “delibity”: deliberate serendipity, the act of creating the opportunity for luck to happen — in this case the opportunity for life to present itself.

The trails so calm and quiet these past few months now seem positively frisky with chipmunks awakened from their hibernation. But just as the dandelions are something more, the chipmunks exceed being merely chipmunks.

They are goshawk and weasel food and marten and gray fox food. Though present and active year-round, these predators now or soon will have offspring to tend. Hungry mouths mean more hunting activity.

They survive by their secrecy; seeing them is not a matter of luck but rather a matter of delibity.

Walking these slopes, listening for the chorus frogs, looking for the wildflowers, watching for a goshawk, hoping for a marten — all this and more — coalesce into the setting that makes a picnic in the woods or a hike to the lake what it is.

Rich and wonderful and worth doing. Again and again.

Life is about living not about sitting back. May is the month, more than any other, in which life begs for attention.

It might be a litter of red fox pups. It might be a two-tailed swallowtail on a lilac in bloom. It might be a grump-faced short-horned lizard. It might be a hefty common carp leaping from marsh waters.

Or it might be a sprawl of dandelions in bloom.

Something has the power to remind you that life is happening. Remember it and trust it, then put on your boots, get your hat and jacket, grab your binocular and go find May.